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© 2016 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. Historically, the European Commission has followed an expert-based depoliticized route to gain attention for policy issues and the credibility to deal with them. Given growing politicization, we ask whether the Commission might increasingly seek citizens’ views and whether there is patterned variation. We provide the first mapping of special Eurobarometers, the massive instrument for issue-specific public opinion. We found a steep increase and a curvilinear pattern: public opinion is rarely invited in areas of exclusive European Union competencies and exclusive national competencies. Most special Eurobarometers focus on shared competencies. Citizens are almost never asked about expenditure programmes and never on immigration. There is large variation across the Directorates General, which is only weakly related to the amount of planned legislation and the number of expert committees. Business-oriented Directorates General are much less likely to seek public opinion. These results open up promising avenues for research on agenda-setting strategies at times of politicization. ispartof: Journal of European Public Policy vol:25 issue:3 pages:327-345 status: published

Public opinion does not fall out of the sky. What passes for public opinion in the European Union is largely the answers of its citizens to questions posed in surveys commissioned and controlled by the European Commission. This paper presents the first systematic mapping of the topics and non-topics of the 400 so-called Special Eurobarometers: reports based on batteries of questions about specific policy issues posed in face-to-face interviews to about 25,000 citizens, constituting nationally representative samples of all member states. This exploration is especially relevant against the background of the increased politicisation of the EU; both given the potential value of public opinion as a “substitute” for a more direct link to the electorate and as a power resource in decision-making. We chart the frequency of Special EBs over time, identify the topics (and non-topics) using the Comparative Agenda Project’s EU codebook, and relate their frequency to the distribution of competencies between the EU and its member states. We also document the variation across DGs in their effort to gauge public opinion. We conclude that the Commission is increasingly seeking public opinion and that it does so in a very broad range of policy areas. We find a curvilinear relationship between the degree of EU competencies and the frequency of Special EBs. Citizen input is less sought in areas where the EU already has far reaching competencies and in areas which are clearly in the national (or even sub-national) domain. The lion’s share of Special EBs is conducted in the realm of shared competencies, with an emphasis on those areas where the EU got involved relatively recently. We also detected only two Special EBs specifically related to the redistribution of resources (e.g., cohesion policy) and none on immigration. We also find a large variation across the DGs on whose behalf Special EBs are conducted. Three DGs are responsible for half of all EBs and nine DGs for less than five percent. These results open up promising avenues for research on the responsiveness of the European Commission and its agenda setting strategies and legitimacy seeking behaviour.

We are grateful for the thoughtful discussion of our book by Goetz and Mahoney and the valuable remarks of other contributors. In our final statement we want to address three points. First, we would like to revisit our distinction between three approaches to explanatory case studies. This is triggered by Goertz and Mahoney’s statement that our congruence approach usually requires elements of one of our two other approaches, the co-variational approach and causal-process tracing. Secondly, in a response to comments by Rohlfing we want to briefly clarify what we mean by a co-variational approach to explanatory small-N research. Finally, we would like to take up the notion of Goertz and Mahoney that we are witnessing a third wave of qualitative methodology. We will argue that work of this new wave is particularly promising when it comes to closing the gap between those interested in the methodological per se and those looking for concrete guidelines and advice for actually conducting qualitative research.

Gary Goertz and James Mahoney are masters in presenting methodological messages in an accessible, lucid, and at the same time focused and precise style. Their Tale of Two Cultures: Qualitative and Quantitative Research in the Social Sciences is another impressive example of this quality. In this book they juxtapose the statistical and the set-theoretical ways of thinking as two distinct and internally “relatively coherent cultures of research” (footnote 2, p. 5). They feel obliged to label these two cultures “quantitative” and “qualitative” because “the qualitative-quantitative distinction is built into nearly everyone’s vocabulary in the social sciences, and it serves as a common point of reference for distinguishing different kinds of work” although they admit that those labels “are quite inadequate for capturing the most salient differences between the two traditions” (p. 5). For Goertz and Mahoney, the two cultures differ basically in two respects: (a) whereas quantitative research is focusing primarily on cross-case analysis, inferences in qualitative studies are drawn primarily on the basis of within-case analysis; (b) quantitative scholars use the sophisticated techniques of statistics; qualitative scholars, in contrast, use—albeit often implicitly—logic and set theory. We agree with Goertz and Mahoney when it comes to the two methodological cultures they describe but we are less convinced by their labeling, because a significant part of what makes research qualitative is not captured by their approach. We will come back to this point when we present our more critical remarks about the book.

Research focusing on the leader-laggard dynamic in EU policy-making has significantly contributed to our understanding of why EU policies often go beyond the least common denominator and why policies look the way they do. The literature has also provided plausible arguments about the incentives for leader states to do so, but it has given less attention to the question of how leader states achieve this outcome. This article aims to shed some light on this question by focusing on the expert strategy: the mobilisation of government officials and related experts who possess a high level of content expertise to advance leader states’ interest in EU policy-making. The expert strategy is analysed with reference to the Dutch government’s involvement in EU chemical policy (REACH). Keywords: national interest; regulatory politics; risk regulation; environmental policy; knowledge; expert committees; policy learning; agenda-setting; implementation; Netherlands; political science

In diesem Artikel wird an Hand zweier EG-Mitgliedstaaten gezeigt, welchen Einfluß die 'Europäisierung' der Regionalpolitik auf die Handlungsspielräume der Kommission und die verschiedenen mitgliedstaatlichen politischen Ebenen haben kann. Dazu wird die Implementation des Europäischen Fonds für Regionale Entwicklung in Großbritannien und der Bundesrepublik Deutschland untersucht. Um die aktuelle Entwicklung im Zeitraum von 1988 bis 1992 besser berücksichtigen zu können, wurden die Regionen West Midlands und Ruhrgebiet als Fallbeispiele ausgewählt. Hier wurden Interviews mit Schlüsselakteuren geführt. Ausgehend von der theoretischen Annahme einer wechselseitigen Ressourcenabhängigkeit der unterschiedlichen politischen Ebenen läßt sich sowohl eine Zentralisierung als auch eine Dezentralisierung der europäischen Regionalpolitik feststellen, eine Entwicklung, die, bezogen auf dieses Politikfeld, auf einen Übergang des souveränen Nationalstaates in ein Mehrebenennetzwerk hindeutet. In Großbritannien gelang den Local Authorities eine Ausweitung der Handlungsspielräume, eine Tendenz, die im augenfälligen Widerspruch zu der allgemeinen Entwicklung der britischen Staat-Kommunen Beziehungen steht. In der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (alt) konnten die Länder ihre Position gegenüber dem Bund verbessern. Diese Dezentralisierungstendenz schlug allerdings nicht signifikant auf die Kommunen durch. In beiden Mitgliedstaaten intensivierten sich die Kontakte zwischen der Kommission und subnationalen Akteuren. This paper analyses the impact of the 'europeanization' of regional policy on the discretionary authority of the EC Commission and national and sub-national actors. This is done for the case of the implementation of the European Regional Development Fund in Britain and Germany. Assuming that the various political levels are linked through mutual resource dependency the study found both centralization and decentralization in ERDF implementation. These developments indicate that - at least for this policy field - sovereign nation states as dominant actors are transformed into sector specific multilevel networks, facing an increasing role of the European Commission. British local authorities succeeded in increasing their discretionary authority vis-a-vis the central government, in contrast with the general central-local relations, which have become more centralized. The German Länder were also able to improve their position as against the Federal Government. However, this process of decentralization did not increase the authority of municipal authorities. In both countries contacts between the European Commission and sub-national actors were intensified.

EU Agencies are becoming central players in the development and implementation of European laws and regulations. In this research, I show what actions private stakeholders undertake to interact with EU Agencies and how EU Agencies in turn react to private stakeholders.